Book: American gods. Page 4

- Don't be afraid of the dark.
- I'm not afraid. I'm afraid people in the dark.

I may be a cruel thing to say, but grief and joy - it's like milk and cookies. Is not sorrow without joy, as there is no milk without cookies.

Not seeing the individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, hundreds of thousands of deaths, "the death toll could reach a million". Add to the statistics of the thoughts and feelings of individuals, and they will appeal to the people.
However, this is also a lie, because people suffer so much that the very scale of numbers dulls. See the bloated belly of the child, his skeletal handles and flies, crawling in the corners of the eyes? You'll feel better if you know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? If you see it from the inside? But if you feel better, I don't we're going to pinch his sister, lying next to him in the burning dust, is a distorted and swollen caricature of a human child?
Suppose we begin to sympathize with them. But what about them? Why are they more important than a thousand other children that singed the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the myriads of wriggling mushinyh children?
We build walls around these moments of suffering that they are unable to hurt us, and remain on their Islands. And these moments covered with a smooth iridescent layer, then to slip off, like gems, from our souls without real pain.

"No man is an island," proclaimed Donne, but I was wrong. If we were not Islands, we would be lost, drowned in someone else's grief. We are isolated (like everyone on the island) from other people's tragedies because of its island nature, and because of the repeatability of the canvas and the essence of the stories. The backbone is not changed: the man was born, lived, and then for one reason or another died. That's all. Details can add from my experience of you. The story is unoriginal, like any other, unique as any life. Life is the fact that snowflakes are formed in the pattern which we have seen before. They are as like each other as peas in a pod (have you ever seen the peas in a pod? I mean, ever carefully looked at them? If you look closely, then you'll never confuse one with the Other), and still unique.

You're so full of shit, which is strange, as eyes were not brown.

Life as a commodity, people as possessions.

We go back to my life. Life, which like all other and any one of them is not similar.

Literature allows us to enter the minds of other people, apparent to us in other worlds, and to look at the world through their eyes. And then in the book, we stop before we die, or die a strange death, and in the world outside of the novel turn the page or close the book.

A city without a bookstore and not a city at all, if you want my opinion.

There was no light on the present war between the two factions, in which each did not consider himself right.

- And you? Why do you do what you do?
- Because I want to. Therefore it is correct.

Tell him that language is a virus, religion is an operating system and prayers cheap spam.

Stereotypes. We must learn to think for yourself and not listen to what they say on the box.

Maybe they are dirty maybe they are cheap, and feeding them shit, but at least they do not say cliches.